Zennor in Darkness: From the Women’s Prize-Winning Author of A Spell of Winter

As always, Dunmore’s writing is rich in character, compelling story, beautiful writing.

This is an amazing first novel by Helen Dunmore. It was hard to track down a copy but I perservered because I read that the setting is Cornwall during WWI (interesting time period) and that D.H.Lawrence (a favorite) and his wife are secondary characters. Dunmore captures the period and as far as I can remember about Lawrence (it's been awhile) his persona. Dunmore's switches in narrator flow smoothly. She convincingly captures the sense of place and time so that the reader feels the spray of the sea on the craggy inlets and feels the war's effect on all the characters.

Claire Coyne is an intelligent young woman tending to her widower father, making the best of wartime shortages in a remote village in Cornwall. She has some talent for drawing, which needs encouragement. That encouragement will come from her neighbor, the red-beaded Mr. Lawrence and his German wife. And her cherished cousin John Williams is coming home from the war, for a visit. And that will change everything, for john Williams is not quite himself anymore."Zennor in Darkness" superbly captures a time and a place. If the temporary presence of the real-life author D.H. Lawrence in Zennor during the First World War was an excuse to write, this novel is so much more. Its picture of the people of a small village in Cornwall seems spot-on. Their struggles with the effects of the war seem equal parts intimate and terrifying. The reader is encouraged to read it all before making judgment. Well recommended.

The title is less mysterious than it might seem. Zennor is a tiny town near St. Ives in Cornwall where D. H. Lawrence leased a secluded cottage in 1916 and 1917. The Darkness is of course the First World War, which claimed the young men of the county, brought German U-Boats to their shores, and set the suspicious villagers against Lawrence, his strange pacifist ways, and his German wife Frieda von Richthofen (a distant cousin of the celebrated Red Baron). Also straddling the gap between two worlds is Clare Coyne and her widowed father Francis, an impoverished younger son of minor Catholic aristocracy, whose wife, a former lady's maid, died of TB while Clare was still an infant, leaving her to be brought up mainly by her extended family in this Cornish town, people of good heart but a different class and religion from her father. But while Francis Coyne lives in isolation on dwindling investments, writing a book on local botany, Clare leads a full life among her relatives and friends, developing her talents as an artist, and eventually striking up a friendship with Lawrence himself.Zennor is a lovely place, with bracing cliff landscapes and sea air, beautifully evoked by Helen Dunmore. But the darkness is never far from their doors. Telegrams arrive with sickening frequency announcing yet another death. Men return wounded in invisible ways. Passions flare in brief encounters that only reinforce awareness of the destruction taking place just the other side of the Channel. ZENNOR IN DARKNESS ranks with Pat Barker's  REGENERATION  trilogy as a view of war from the sidelines, helpless but by no means unaffected.This is a remarkable achievement by any standard, but as a first [adult] novel it is simply astounding. I can certainly see similarities with her two more recent books that I have read: she will use the WW1 period again in  A SPELL OF WINTER , and Clare's Cornish childhood is very similar to that of the heroine in  TALKING TO THE DEAD ; indeed the power of childhood memories and close familial connections is a powerful theme in all three books. But as opposed to the rather melodramatic plot constructs in those later novels, this one deals with a period that needs no additional drama; its story unfolds naturally, almost inevitably; and its combination of fact and fiction seems effortless. Clare is a beautiful character, and Dunmore's Lawrence shares that edgy charisma that made his thinly-veiled appearance in Aldous Huxley's  POINT COUNTER POINT  the highlight of that book also. I am eager to see what Dunmore makes of another real-life wartime setting, that of the siege of Leningrad, in her 2002 novel,  THE SIEGE .

A visit to St Ives and the surrounding area had introduced me to Zennor and the connections of the place with D H Lawrence. The local museum was very interesting and threw light on D H Lawrence's relationship with his German wife, and the reactions of the local people to the war, especially with an enemy ( Freida, D H Lawrence's partner) living in their midst.The reviews of the book Zennor in Darkness on Amazon have been positive. I started reading the book, wanting to be enlightened about the Cornish countryside, Zennor, and D H Lawrence and his relationships. After about 40 pages I found my mind was drifting away from the book, and although I did read the book to the end, it was a real struggle, not a book I would like to recommend.Trying to understand why my reaction is so different from other reviewers, I would like to suggest the following:The present tense in which most of the book is written does not somehow convey the full impact of any event.The writer has not been able to convey very powerfully to the reader the darkness of Zennor, the theme of the book.The relationship between D H Lawrence and Frieda, and of the local people was such a powerful period in Zennor that it could have been turned into a very gripping book. The reason maybe that the author tried to hint at events/relationship, rather focusing on the crucial ones.I believe later books by Helen Dunmore have been more focussed.

So engaging and evocative of a time both mythical and rooted in reality. Dunmore’s writing is a pleasure to read.

I love Dunmore's writing. It pulls you straight into the story. The intriguing glimpse into the life of DH Lawrence has stimulated me to read more about him.

This book had love, heartbreak and suspicion. Set in 1915 the book was about Clare and her family and about writer DH Lawrence and his German wife. Not totally my cup of tea as a book club read, but it was well written.

Nothing in particular to recommend this novel. Not well researched regarding the Cornish whose dialect at the time would have been almost unintelligible to Lawrence. No reference to it in the book. I’m not sure what the motivation or the purpose of the story is. Generally speaking full with nothing much to recommend it.

Set in a period that not so many people will now remember, this novel is tremendously atmospheric, the beauty of Cornwall, the intense awareness of people in a small community and the ways in which WW2 affected them are powerfully described. DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda make brief appearances in the story - they actually lived near Zennor for a while - but the main story is about a young woman, Clare, growing up in the village with the shadow of young men leaving to fight and never returning. I found it difficult to put down.